As semiconductor technology advances in the form of smaller and faster circuitry, more and more components can be implemented in a single semiconductor die. One type of die is a so-called system-on-chip (SoC) in which multiple agents are present that can be used to process data and perform other operations. Interconnectivity between these agents is achieved by a network-on-chip (NoC), which can be based on various methods including a packet-routing network, a bus, ring or so forth. However, these approaches can have issues with regard to design complexity, limited scalability, or area/power efficiency. Furthermore, some of the known interconnections may exhibit complex deadlock/contention problems to be resolved.
Most implementations include some type of buffer medium as part of the transport mechanism between agents, given that due to traffic considerations, latencies and so forth, multiple packets may be present in the transport mechanism between agents. While a ring can provide for a bufferless medium, such rings have historically been of a single dimension such that the ring concept does not leverage to multi-dimensions.